Microsoft Releases Windows 7 Beta as a Free Download
blog.wired.com
blog.wired.com
1. I do have to interact with Windows even if I don't use it - and my friends are too cheap to get a Mac and think Linux is a Peanuts character.
2. If Microsoft has good ideas, they will spread. The Windows taskbar turned out to be a great UI device that we see in KDE and Gnome among other places.
3. While I love the Mac OS X, Apple can be somewhat heavy handed with its users sometimes. Want a 17" notebook? No removable battery for you! Not a choice of whether it's important to you, whether you'd prefer the added weight, it just doesn't exist. The greater the competition from Microsoft, the more Apple will bend to users.
4. I can't wait to see the Apple commercials calling Windows 7 Vista 2 ;-).
While some Linux enthusiasts might see a stronger Windows as a barrier to Linux adoption, I guess I'm less hard core about FOSS and would rather pay up for a platform (as I do with my Mac) since I use it so much.
That's partially true - the internal version number for Windows 7 is 6.1 (Windows Vista being 6.0):
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/1...
Snow Leopard is OS X v10.6.
Mac market share has only been growing over time. If Apple was going to "bend to its users", they would've done that 5 years ago when they were still struggling to gain market share. Apple seems to have made it this far on a philosophy of "Steve's way or the highway."
Now maybe Windows 7 can change that, but I think it's a stretch at best.
I personally hope Windows does well. Buying or building a PC and installing windows is usually a lot cheaper than buying a Mac with equivalent specs. Therefore if Windows makes a good product, I won't have to spend more to get the same stability.
Though, I'm mainly a Linux user. I don't see Windows as a threat to Linux. Many Linux users use Windows on one level or another, either in a virtual machine or in a dual boot. It's not a zero-sum game; they can coexist.
You act like there's an easy other option for Apple, who ignored it out of malicious dictatorial concerns.
Any other option would have had its own engineering tradeoffs (and design, support, components, manufacturing changes, documentation, training...)
And supporting multiple options would be even worse.
As it stands, they've chosen a non-removable battery so they can do a custom shape and fit 40% more in. I have a book by Peter Cochrane (former head of British Telecom research) where he talked about longer battery life in laptops by making the battery a structural component (bigger, but not heavier because it replaces part of the chassis) sometime before 1997, and this is the first time I've noticed anyone take it seriously.
Yes, some people will be annoyed, but there are many who use the 17" MBP as a luggable desktop, or mostly plugged in. It's not the case that they could ever pick a design to please everyone, and this one has the added benefit that at least it's not purely aesthetic - you get a nonremovable battery, but you get a longer battery life and more charge cycles out of it too. And anyone handy with a screwdriver will probably be able to replace it and there will probably be external backup batteries - carrying one of those will be little different to carrying a spare for a removable battery...
(By the way - the book is "108 Tips for Time Travellers" - lots of essays on technology. I remember it being very good).
All this, just prior to Apple putting out a modestly tweaked version of their own OS X Leopard, which is unlikely to upstage Windows 7 too much.
Very Impressive. Maybe Ballmer knows what he's doing after all.
Now, Windows is playing catch-up. They need not only to fix Vista but to add improvements. The ones they are adding still mostly fall into the Leopard blanket of feature, with the exception of the patently bizarre "half-window" feature. Apple, meanwhile, is calling Snow Leopard a speed tweak: they're reducing filesize, adding Exchange support, and improving their Quicktime codecs for native filetype support. In other words, they're closing the window and removing vulnerabilities. Everybody thinks Apple has the superior featureset, and if they're also faster and sturdier and have business support, then they have a legitimate chance of getting the vast upper hand here.
I think Microsoft is learning from their mistakes, but they're learning slowly. It'll take them a long time to clean out the muckiness of their operating system and create something as minimal as OS X. And, from what I've seen of Windows 7, they're still not going at it the right way.
I'm convinced this one comes from watching actual users do their thing. It's a huge waste of screen real estate to maximize on a large monitor, especially a widescreen one - do you really want to read a PDF 3 lines at a time? Much better to emulate having two monitors. I've used GridMove to do this for a while now.
Given that I won't pay the Apple tax, it's Linux for me for the foreseeable future.
Basically it's the full MSDN for 3 years. It also includes hosting deals for the server products. At the _end_ of the 3 years you have to pay $100. Overall pretty sweet if you're using the MSFT stack or need the OS's for testing.
If you're a Stirr member they can connect you - there are also other partners you can find on the bizspark site.
I never had a problem with Vista, in fact I used it for nearly 3 years (or there abouts...from the early builds till earlier in the year), until I got a Mac in June. I dislike Windows now, I'll admit it, but I know from experience Vista wasn't that bad (just launch hiccups which taunted its reign), so as long as 7 is an improvement on a perfectly good OS, all is good. Not enough for me to even think about using it as my main OS, but thats just my preference of OS; its very childish to flame somebody because of their choice of OS when it doesn't affect you in any way at all.
1) My girlfriend has a Vista laptop that shipped with 1GB of RAM. Its incredibly slow because Vista attempts to cache everything in memory, but then doesn't have enough memory to handle program launches. I know its s a simple fix -- upgrade to 2GB -- but compared to my best friends Mac Book with 1 GB -- who has room to launch iTunes, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Adium, and iPhoto with no problems -- its insane that a similar spec laptop with Vista would struggle to load Firefox.
2. To uninstall something in windows, since windows 3.1, you would go to a control panel called "Add/Remove Programs". That's been the convention since Vista. That's like a 15+ year convention. Its now been re-named to something complicated like "Program Configuration and Setting". If it was going to change, it should've had a simpler name, like "Uninstall Programs", not a more confusing one.
It seems Microsoft's B-team is just godawful at Design. They're basically the GM of software at this point.
2. There's a "Classic View" option on the side of the control panel that allows you to see "Add/Remove Programs"
Microsoft does have a bit of an analogy to the American car industry - viruses are like the autoworkers unions. Microsoft users need to run antivirus software most of the time (though it's changing because of beefed up security within windows and windows finally not running everything as root), and it's like how American car companies pay $3000 more per car because American workers are more expensive.
No such difference if you swap yourself. Actually I got a used 1gb ram from a Mac and installed it on a PC.
Maybe you haven't heard, but Macs use Intel chipsets now. RAM is RAM. The 90% of the mac faithful that have actually bought a mac before switcher ads know that you never buy RAM from Apple. And let's avoid the price-point argument because it can really go either way depending on what you're doing and what you're looking for.
>2. There's a "Classic View" option on the side of the control panel that allows you to see "Add/Remove Programs"
FAIL. I was using classic view. Its not called "Add/Remove Programs" anymore. I even fired up my Vista Business VHD image on my XP workstation to double check...and yup....FAIL UI still FAILs at UI. The control panel is called "Programs and Features".
Also, your analogy makes no sense whatsoever. GM is billing for pensions and obligations it agreed to shoulder in good faith, but never funded, because it assumed it would never faulter in terms of revenue, and thus, it would have the income to pay out those obligations at a later date. Unions are about 3% of the problem. Bad Design and Bad Management are the other insignificant 97%.
Using left over memory to cache things is what you should do. Linux does it too, I would assume OS X does.
You periodically flush any changed bits in the cache to disk.
* When programs try and use more memory, you simply throw away the cache (except any changed bits you haven't yet written to disk). * When they don't, your file access is 300,000 times faster
Vista with 1GB does not really have "left over". Either that, or the Vista's "pre-emptive app caching" algorithms are really terrible, because the first two apps my girlfriend always launches are 1) iTunes and 2) Firefox. It should figure that out and launch them quickly, instead of disk thrashing for 15-30 seconds and then launching them.
It affects me a lot. People around me are grumpier, the computers I support are more of a pain in the neck, the software ecosystem is pushed towards software for an OS I don't like, people are missing out on really useful features and being less happy and sometimes less productive than they could be...
I think microsoft deliberately adds delays/slowdowns/unoptimized code into windows.
Then each release they fix some of it - and voila it's faster than the one before it.
With vista they finally ran out of delays that they could remove, and that's why it's so slow. So they figured, if it's slow, let go all the way, and added in a new batch of slowdowns.
And right on schedule Windows 7 is faster than the one before it.
It should leave you with a thin, responsive, vista-based OS that looks a lot like Win XP/2K with some Vista influence.